


The Bluest Rose

by penandfink



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: ASoIaF, F/M, Gen, community: asoiaf_exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-07
Updated: 2011-01-07
Packaged: 2017-10-14 12:08:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/149120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penandfink/pseuds/penandfink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who was Lyanna Stark, and why did she run?  And where was she going without ever knowing the way?</p><p>Pt 1 is Lyanna's childhood at Winterfell, Pt 2 covers the events at Harrenhal, and Pt 3 has the "abduction"/Tower of Joy stuff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Crack in the Wall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coaldustcanary](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coaldustcanary/gifts).



> The prompt for this fic was "Rhaegar/Lyanna - An unromantic, brutal view of their relationship."

In the north country many things grow that are hard to find elsewhere. They do not boast of their treasures there – out of a sense of dignity, yes, but of futility too. It can be hard to make someone accustomed only to fleshy green things understand the beauty of that which thrives in wind and rock and snow.

If you are from the north country yourself, likely you needn’t be told.

Gardens are of curious standing up there. Northmen are a breed inclined toward flinty harshness, yet many a northern stronghold set aside some bit of earth made pretty by trees and flowers and the like. In the time of Lord Rickard Stark and his children, Winterfell had an especially beautiful garden. This oughtn’t to surprise, since the castle was quite warm and, as the highest seat of all the north, had the greatest potential for producing the sort of devoted, appreciative patron that gardens up there often needed. Noble ladies of a particular persuasion tended to be fond of flowers, for some reason. Roses most of all.

Lord Stark lost his wife a few years after gaining his only daughter, and so it fell to the girl to uphold the tradition.

  
She had three brothers, who were not of much help in the garden, but they were not at all the mean sort of brothers and she loved them dearly – Brandon for his courage and Ned for his sweetness, and Benjen because he was a baby and babies needed such affections. They loved her dearly too, and thought it quite well that she should busy herself with the flowers, as Mother would want. “Lyanna,” they’d say when she came in from the garden, roses in hand, “you’ve outdone yourself this time,” and she would smile and invite them along the next time she went picking.

“Oh, we couldn’t do that,” Brandon answered once, raking his fingers through his tumble of hair.

“Why not?”

“Why, we’re boys. Boys don’t pick flowers.”

Ned took her aside and explained, with a patience beyond his eight years, that boys and girls played at different games. “But this game of flowers is very special, Lya, for of all of us here, you are the only one who can play it.”

Lyanna thought this sounded very nice and felt a bit better about things. “But couldn’t Ben come with me? He isn’t _really_ a boy yet, only a baby.” After a brief conference, Brandon and Ned decided that it was alright, though they found his picking abilities dubious.

  
That year Ned was to go to the Vale of Arryn to live with another father. “It’s called fostering. Lots of boys have to do it.”

“But not Brandon,” she said.

“Brandon gets to stay.”

“I get to stay too.”

“For now.” Ned smiled.

Joyous as she was to not be a boy just then, a rather concerning issue remained. “Who will tell me stories?”

“Brandon?” Ned suggested, but the look on her face revealed how silly the idea was. “Old Nan knows more stories than anyone in Winterfell.”

“The hero ones are never about girls,” she lamented. Ned always put girls in when she asked, even though she usually had to tell him what they ought to do and in the end it was like she was telling the story herself.

“That’s because you never wait long enough. The parts at the end when the heroes wed, that’s when the girls will show up.”

“That’s not the same. And also, I shall miss you,” she added as a final objection. It didn’t sway her lord father’s decision, for he had already given his word of honor as a Stark, but for its own sake she had to say how she felt.

  
Winterfell was lonelier with Ned away. The baby was only three, and Brandon was often here and there with Father, so Lyanna would sit in the garden all by herself and cry, with only the flowers as her witness. They were good confidantes, who never told anyone of her tears, and of them she loved the blue roses the best. Lyanna liked all roses, with their petals like burnt paper and their dark leaves and their many thorns, which she found quite impressive. But blue roses had something of the winter in them, some wilder kind of beauty. Maester Luwin, the learned man of her father’s castle, told her that nobody had ever planted the blue roses in the garden. They had helped themselves in from the cold by crawling over the castle walls, though they had contrived to keep their wintry cast all the same. Lyanna thought they looked like sad things in a happy place, and so her great friendship with them was born.

One day amidst her floral reverie she came upon Brandon in the garden. “How surprising!”

“I’m not here for the flowers,” he said immediately. He wanted there to be no confusion. “Father is worried. He wants you to stop your moping before your face gets stuck that way.”

“Is that what I’m doing?” She hadn’t realized there was a word for it, and one so ugly too.

“Why don’t you come play with me?”

“But you don’t play with girls.”

Brandon screwed up his face, as if someone had hit it. “I never said that. I said I didn’t pick flowers, that’s very different.”

“How is it different? I like flowers.”

“But there’s many games to like,” Brandon said, efforting to be reasonable. He had quite a temper, good though he was, and their lord father was always telling him to manage it. “All the games Ned used to play with me. I can’t play them any more now that he’s gone, but you could play them with me and then I could again.”

“Like rats and cats?”

“Yes.”

“And monsters and maidens?”

Brandon nodded vigorously.

“And riding and knights and outlaws and swordplay?”

“Yes _yes_.”

“Do I have to be the damsel?” she asked, suddenly wary.

Brandon was eager to show that he was capable of compromise, and generously said, “You don’t if I don’t.”

And so they did quite well without any damsels.

  
Their regimen of boy games suited Lyanna well, for she found she was good at a number of things like running and climbing, and most especially horse-riding. Girls rode horses too, her father said, but with Brandon she had someone to race, which was not so easy to do in skirts. When she was six, Brandon gave her a wooden sword he’d had made just for her, though he told her not to tell Father, and her newest favorite thing became climbing on her pony and brandishing it about like some great hero. Then Brandon started teaching her how to use it, and that made it even better.

Still, she felt lonely sometimes. Brandon was Father’s heir, and so he had to be with Father learning heir things much of the time. And sometimes even Ben went with, for he was becoming less of a baby and more of a boy, which was one thing Lyanna could never be. Only boys could accompany Father when he took his greatsword out to the hills beyond the castle walls to do justice, for one example.

“What’s justice?” Lyanna asked Brandon, one morning before he was to set out with Father.

“It’s when someone does something wrong and you make it right.”

“How do you do that?”

Brandon waved his hand a little impatiently. “It’s complicated, Lya. There’s lots of rules. But it’s something we have to do, because we’re the wolves.”

“We’re the wolves,” Lyanna repeated, pointing to the direwolf symbol on Brandon’s lordliest cloak. “Starks are wolves.”

“Yes, and a Stark must always stand for what is right and just and honorable.” He was using his Important Voice.

“Then how come I can’t come with you and Father and Ben, if I’m a Stark too? I am a Stark, right?”

Brandon did not have an answer. “Just wait until I get back and we can go play again, alright?”

She watched him leave with Father and baby Benjen, who was seven now, from her window. When he came back, Brandon had to go seek her out again in her garden.

  
It was a curious thing that Lyanna took to such a melancholy habit, for she had many of the traits that happy children do. Indeed, it would be mistaken to say she was not a happy child, for she had games and adventures and her brothers were still her playmates when they could be. She laughed often, whether at table having pease wars with Ben, or during her sword practice with Brandon as she felt herself improving, or in the godswood playing seek-and-find around the too-solemn heart tree. Once she was eight, Ned even began to visit Winterfell again. He said that his foster father, whose name was Lord Jon Arryn, wanted him to stay in the Vale until he became used to his new home. “It isn’t so bad, for there’s a boy there my age to play with. Robert Baratheon,” he explained. It was lovely to have him back in his old home, regardless.

She showed Ned all the swordplaying Brandon had taught her, even won against him in her first demonstration. Ned did not have the love of swords that she and Brandon did, but he was glad for her all the same, and only later in her life did Lyanna realize that he must have let her win. She was still four years younger than him, and quite small even for her age. But at the time it was a great victory for her, and probably for the best that she could believe in it.

For all this, she grew ever fonder of her lonely blue roses, wilder and stranger than the rest. While it was summer, she had asked Ned to convince their lord father to have them planted outside her window, so that she might see them every morning when she woke up. Brandon always told her not to bother Father with such things, but Ned obliged her, not seeing any harm in it, and so she had her very own blue roses before summer’s end. She was not so fortunate on other fronts; she had wanted permission to carry a sword for true like Brandon, but Lord Rickard would not hear of it, not even when she got Ned to ask for her.

She still loved him for trying.

  
It was a winter year when Brandon went south with Lord Rickard that first time, and the snows did not make travel easy, but they were not so very hard for a party of Starks either. Father and son were invited to Riverrun below the Neck by Lord Hoster Tully, a man of good repute and an excess of daughters in need of marriage prospects. Brandon had seemed excited about the whole thing, and Lyanna could only account for this peculiarity by his years. He was fourteen now, an age at which many people suddenly find marriage a pleasant idea. He was lighter than a feather.

For her part, Lyanna was not happy that two of her brothers should be away at once; one was bad enough. Brandon and her lord father planned to stay in the south a comfortable old time, and Ned would not be visiting at all that year.

“Is she to come live here with us? I wouldn’t like that if I were her. She’ll be leaving everything she loves behind. Maybe Brandon could go live with her.” But Old Nan only laughed, and Maester Luwin told her it could not be so.

  
At twelve, Lyanna herself became a flower. That’s how the castle women spoke of it, that is. _Flowering_ , the start of a girl’s moon blood, her passage into womanhood. Lyanna had heard of it before, of course, but not often, and she couldn’t help but wonder what fool thought to call it such a thing. Flowers were beautiful and gave one pleasure, while this moon’s blood business did nothing of the sort.

Then she realized that the pleasure was for someone else to enjoy. Flowering meant that she was ready to be wedded, for she could be bedded and bear her husband a child to continue his line. Maester Luwin reassured her that it was not common for girls of twelve to marry, though betrothal was another matter. “Your brother’s intended was twelve at the time they were promised,” he said.

“Simply because she is able to bear a child?”

“It’s as good a time as any, no?”

The worst part was when the stomach pains came, and she had to stay in bed all day long while her brothers practiced at swords below. She wondered how her lady mother had withstood it all, and found it terribly unfair that she had died before Lyanna was old enough to realize that it needed asking.

But there was a brighter side: when her body started changing she caught the attention of a stableboy who would eventually introduce her to the art of kissing. She didn’t tell her brothers, but she quite enjoyed it.

  
Then spring came, and all the roses were in bloom.

Winterfell was rather busy in these days, for young lord Brandon had turned nineteen before the turn of the moon, and to tell the truth he was quite ready to get on with his wedding once and for all. He’d never been reluctant to join the ranks of manhood. Preparations were underway in the Great Keep for the arrival of its prospective mistress, even though the new lady of Winterfell would not come north until the following year. The _old_ lady of Winterfell had been dead and gone a good while now, and death was really not as preferable a perfume as lilacs or lemongrass to make a young bride feel welcome. Unabashedly, Brandon hoped the fuss would encourage his father to hurry the process along, but Lord Rickard could only spread his hands helplessly and sigh.

“Would that you were wed already, my son. It is Lord Tully, and not I, who delays.”

“But my lord, you do not think he means to break the pact. Do you?” Poor Brandon grew visibly consternated at the notion, and Lyanna, bursting into the solar just then with bare arms full of roses, could not help her laughter. She tucked a blossom, blood red, behind her brother’s ear, and another white as a ghost into the breast of her father’s surcoat, and set about acquainting the room with the pale morning sun.

Lord Rickard plucked the ghost blossom from his breast and smiled, solemn and sad. “I think he is a man suddenly confronted with the undeniable reality of his daughter leaving him, and it frightens him senseless.”

Something happened then wholly without consultation of the young bachelor. An impulse in the air, a spark like invisible lightning, traveled between the wolf lord and his girl child, and no words were needed. She was fourteen herself now, she had seen before what fourteen brought.

“Oh, well,” Brandon went on, “at least it’s nothing dishonorable. Damned inconvenient though, I must say.”

  
A strangely green cast seized the sky the day Lyanna’s intended betrothed came to Winterfell. Nobody had informed her yet that she would be wedding Lord Robert Baratheon, but she knew, the way a hen knows when she is being led to slaughter. Oh, he was handsome for a certainty, strong and powerfully made, no doubt possessed of the valor that such specimen are able to afford. And he was Ned’s best friend, too. They rode up the kingsroad side by side all the way from the Vale, jesting easily as if they’d come into the world together. Ned almost seemed happier to introduce Lord Robert than Lord Robert did to meet her, and Brandon could match the man mirth for easy mirth. Lord Rickard was pleased through his solemnity.

“I’m glad they’re all so happy together already,” she whispered to Ben at table.

“Hrmm?”

She didn’t clarify the point.

After a few days’ observance, Lyanna was sure that Robert Baratheon was no man. He was a tempest. His laughter boomed in the austere halls of her home, and his boots rang on the stoneways like thunder. He had brought dogs and a retinue to hunt with, and the men hunted every morning, and gifts from his own fortress at Storm’s End, most of which were for her, and he had brought dearest Ned back and looking as lively as ever Ned could look. He had set all the castle maids fluttering after him with his coal black hair and eyes like two mountain lakes, and his jovial charm. She could easily believe that he’d brought a few gargoyles to life in his time there.

He also brought news; in celebration of the coming of spring there was to be a great tournament at Harrenhal, the enormous castle of Lord Whent, and the entire kingdom would be in attendance. There would be mummers and games and feasting, wines from the best vineyards in the realm, dancing and music and jousts and a melee and all sorts of contests, beautiful ladies and the greatest of knights, and the dragons themselves, the king and his family.

When he told of it the way he did, it did sound exciting.

  
Slyly, Lyanna’s lord father contrived to acquaint Lord Robert with her in the weeks they had before they were to leave for Harrenhal. They were sat next to each other at table nearly every night, and at times when she was happened upon by him in the library she could have sworn there was a conspiracy to point him her way, for he did not seem a man inclined to seek out a library of his own accord. Her lord father had remarkably allowed Lyanna to accompany the men on some mornings’ hunts in the wolfswood as well, which was conflicting. Why now, why _only_ now, when – when what? When he needed something from her? It was a matter of principle, against which she had to weigh her deeper heart: she had always wanted to go along.

But having never been trained for more, Lyanna could do little but hawk or spectate on these occasions, and neither suited her mood for very long. One morning she broke from the party to let her horse drink from a nearby stream, and finding the crisp air invigorating, she decided to keep riding.

A shape was following her at some distance. She expected to look back and find one of her father’s men, but it was Robert Baratheon, grinning with as much enthusiasm as can be stuffed into a grin. And now that she had looked back, he would know that she’d seen him, and it would be rude to keep on riding as if she hadn’t.

She oughtn’t.

She did.

Over the roots and rocks and leaf-covered pits of the wood’s floor Lyanna’s footing was sure, and she flew over the land like an eagle. She led Robert around a small lake and over a hill, through a long-dried creek and across a bluff overlooking a ravine, the hooves of their horses pounding and pounding. She drove into the heart of the wood where the trees grew thickest, hoping to evade him, but when finally her horse was too tired to continue, and she had to stop, she gazed back once more and saw Lord Robert there atop his black destrier, looking friendly and far too pleased with himself for Lyanna’s taste.

“That was a spirited chase, my lady. Might I ask what your intent was?”

“Running. Just running.”

“Running where?”

In all the pertinent stories, maidens are always running away, but Robert Baratheon was not a great connoisseur of those kinds of stories, so perhaps it’s unfair to fault his ignorance too much.

  
It would be wrong to think that Lyanna was the sort of person who contraried for contrariness’ sake. Willful she was, but not disagreeable, it was never her desire to ruin anyone’s plans. She had strong feelings.

There was a thing she had heard, early on during Robert’s visit, that was the cause of much of her antipathy. She had been in the stables, hiding her practice sword in its usual spot beneath the hay bales with all her arsenal of stealth, when she overheard Ned talking with the man about some woman in the Vale. She kept her breath low, lest this newcomer find out what she was doing and tell her lord father, and when she listened, she realized that the woman they spoke of had borne Robert a child from the wrong side of the sheets. What was more, he seemed not a bit concerned of the bastard child’s needs, for Ned had to remind him that a babe needed more than playing with now and again. Lyanna remembered how the maids of the castle would giggle whenever they saw Lord Baratheon approaching, and she doubted that he had stopped his lusts even while he so clearly was pursuing her.

She found she did not much care for the thought of wedding a man who would be so disloyal. It would be difficult to believe that he loved her, if he could not satisfy himself with her alone, and that distressed her greatly.

Her one hope was that her lord father would likely find Robert dishonorable as well, and she could not believe that he would knowingly give her to a man like that. Perhaps it had seemed a good idea by written correspondence, but now Father had seen the man with his own eyes. And there was Ned, too. Surely Ned had simply not known of this babe of Robert’s before, when he had seemed so pleased to introduce them. As Robert’s visit ripened out of its novelty, Lyanna felt like she was constantly holding her breath.

Then, despite her reasoning, it happened. Her lord father made the announcement promising her to Robert Baratheon, Lord of Storm’s End, deciding she would become his lady wife once she came of age. Lyanna could scarce believe it.

“But my lord, isn’t there something you were going to tell me?” she asked her father in private, after the betrothal feast had ended. “Some dreadful report of his character, mayhaps?”

Her lord father was a Stark, and answered truthfully. “No, daughter, I can think of nothing.”

She turned and fled.

  
As a child, Lyanna had not thought much of wedding. She knew it would come all the same; for her whole life she’d been aware that she was a girl child and not a future knight or guardian of the Watch, or even a penniless errant adventurer. Glory awaited her not, nor veneration in song, nor slumber in a hall of kings. Girls became ladies and ladies married and left their homes for faraway places where even the stars were different, and they bore children to carry on someone else’s name. She didn’t want someone else’s name. She was Lyanna Stark and it suited her fine, if you must know.

The problem with this was that being a Stark could no longer mean for her what it meant for her brothers. Soon they would have other women in their lives, and their children might love her well but never so well as they’d love their mothers. Brandon and Benjen and Ned would have new packs of their own, and Lyanna would have a crack in the wall from which to intrude on their happiness. This, or leave. Lyanna’s predicament, which is easier to articulate from the outside looking in, laid always in wanting two things that refused to be had together, and eventually she would spend the rest of her life trying to have them anyway.

Loneliness is an incredible pressure to bear.

She told her brothers that she did not love Robert, that she would never love Robert, and that they all made a grave mistake not consulting her on the matter.

“There was no nonsense about love at my betrothal,” Brandon pointed out, trying his level best to check his temper. “But I’m sure I will love her someday. It was that way for Father and Mother, it’s the way of the world. You speak with far too much assurance, sister. What do you truly know of such things, child that you are?”

Lyanna knew her heart, but she did not say this. Brandon was not the brother who would understand this. That night whilst the castle slept, she crept into Ned’s old bedchamber, where he would always return to during his visits, and in his arms she wept at last. “I knew you would understand,” she sobbed. “I knew you would help me.”

But when they broke apart, her brother’s face twisted with confusion. “Help you with what?”

“Why, you must help me break this betrothal. Robert is your friend, Father will listen to you. I know he will.”

“Oh, Lya. I cannot do that.”

Her heart crashed like the moon into the sea. He had been her last hope, and the last one is always the hardest to let go. She wept again with her whole body until it shook, until the backs of her back teeth hurt. It was an undignified sight, for her sorrow was real.

When there were no tears left, she sat up and dried her eyes. “Robert will never keep to one bed,” she stated. It was not overconfidence. “I hear he has gotten a child on some girl in the Vale.”

“What he does now will not matter once you are wed. I am sure of it. He is a good man and true, and he will love you with all that is in him.”

Her brother meant well, as he always did. “Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man’s nature.”

Of his natural gifts, her father had given his only girl child his brown hair, his excellent posture, and his still, sad smile. She used the last one then; it was the time for it.

  
Lyanna did not leave Winterfell in anger. When the time came, she kissed her lord father sweetly on the cheek, and meant it besides. A Stark must always remain in Winterfell, which was to say that father and children could not attend the great tourney together, and so the old wolf watched as his cubs rode away laughing and chattering as they did in childhood, under flapping banners of grey and white, and one gold, until they were soft points on a distant line. Then he turned homeward.


	2. The Arrow and the Flame

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who was Lyanna Stark, and why did she run? And where was she going without ever knowing the way?
> 
> Pt 1 is Lyanna's childhood at Winterfell, Pt 2 covers the events at Harrenhal, and Pt 3 has the "abduction"/Tower of Joy stuff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt for this fic was "Rhaegar/Lyanna - An unromantic, brutal view of their relationship."

Harrenhal was an immense castle that lay on the shores of the God’s Eye, further to the south than Riverrun, where Brandon had been promised. Lyanna had never once been below the Neck before, and everything she saw on the journey shone brighter for the newness. The damp, heavy air and mossy curtains of the causeway yielded to open breezes and rolling plains crisscrossed with streams great and small, and as they continued onward the land grew verdant and lush, and the wind took on the scent of honey. The traveling party swelled with the likes of freeriders, hedge knights, mummers and bards, and long before they reached the halls of Lord Whent, their nights were filled with song.

Most of all, Lyanna loved the flowers. In the south flowers were creatures of plenty, their beauty easy and careless, and she could clearly imagine the most fearsome soldier or devoted scholar, or powerful king, abdicating the bonds of his particular duty to lose himself in their bounty. Every day Lord Robert brought her a new flower, a stand of hyacinth or a stem of honeysuckle, a violet or an iris, a buttercup, a primrose, a chrysanthemum, daylilies and nightshades, sunflowers and moonblooms. She kept them all, and made herself a garland to wear, though her brothers laughed and found her a bit silly. What to do? It was difficult to not feel breezy, to keep from frolicking and dashing about on one’s horse and perhaps running off entirely into the distant blue hills. Well, she had always been a little wild.

Lyanna was passing between two august laburnum trees dripping with golden strands when the pavilions first came into view. It was something of a moment.

  
A curious sight presented itself upon arrival at the lawns of Harrenhal, though there were certainly curious sights to spare: jugglers practicing their juggling on long stilts, singers lugging about their harps and drums, farmers with wagons full of hops or turnips or fruits she had never seen before, reedy freeriders and knights with no colors. The sight that caught Lyanna’s attention, however, was that of a small crannogman being unceremoniously shoved to the ground by three young squires. Crannogmen were dwellers of the Neck, northmen in liege but a people elsewise unto their own. They lived in swamps and bogs and carried spears and ate strange things, and their homes were said to move like ice floes. They were not much liked among the finer nobles, for they were humble and their ways of war inlgorious. But Lyanna’s lord father spoke ever well of them and the loyalty with which they defended his lands against southern invasion. By his dress and age, this crannogman could only be Howland Reed, sworn to her lord father’s service.

As she neared, she could hear the squires’ taunts and curses, and see the cruel grins on their faces as they snatched away his frogspear. Every time the little crannogman tried to rise, they shoved him back down and began stomping him with their boots. It was true infamy.

“Stop,” she ordered, bringing up her tourney sword up to ready. A heroic spirit had seized her, a desire to flash her blade and speak with the voice of thunder. “That’s my father’s man you’re kicking.”

“He doesn’t belong here,” sneered the one with the porcupine sigil.

“He’s a frogeater, we don’t like his kind,” agreed the one with the pitchfork sigil.

“And we don’t like you, either,” declared the last one, who had for his sigil two rather ugly grey towers, in peevish tones.

By all the knightly codes known to her, there was no choice but to lay into them with all her might and ken, and so that’s just what Lyanna Stark did. It was a brilliant bit of fighting, really. She was certain that Brandon would have been proud, once he was done being horrified. By the time she was done they were bloody and bruised and utterly humiliated. The crannogman’s thanks were profuse.

“Come back to my tent and I shall mend you up straight away,” she offered gallantly. “You can meet my brothers and feast with us tonight.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” the crannogman said, aghast. “There’s no place for me at the high feast.”

“What do you mean? You must surely be a son of House Reed, as highborn as anyone else here. Come,” she said, taking his arm rather forcefully and striding across the field, “I shan’t even let you refuse.”

  
For evening attire, Lyanna donned her lady’s aura and put away her hero’s one. Many things went into an aura: gait, speech mannerisms, postures of the face – and not least among such people, clothing. She had checked herself three secret times in the mirror to see if she had chosen the best gown, and each time, humility aside, she could but conclude that she had. She looked lovely in her gown of blue, slender and youthful, almost a nymph with her plait of interwoven forget-me-nots, and Robert could not take his eyes off her until they entered Lord Whent’s tremendous feasting hall. There he found his wine, safely ensconced in the temporary custody of one Ser Richard Lonmouth, and Lyanna had her moment’s reprieve of him.

She would try to enjoy her spring magic on her own. She was becoming an individual, and she was considering giving up her embarrassment over her wreaths of flowers and songs of love, especially since her brothers had left her for their other women – left her _first_ , before she had ever done a single thing to them. Why, that very night, Ned was dancing with the most beautiful woman Lyanna had ever seen, gazing into her eyes as if he were simple. She stifled a laugh. Brandon had laughed too when he’d realized that Ned was too shy to ask the woman, whose name was Ashara Dayne, himself, and so he’d gone up on Ned’s behalf to the royal dais where she’d sat, a lady in waiting to the princess Elia of Dorne, who became the third participant in the jest. Love is always funny to an observer.

“But what are you to do about it?” Ben was saying to the little crannogman. “You can’t just do nothing, they’ve wronged you!”

“I know not what I can do,” the crannogman said solemnly. “My people are not trained in the knight’s ways.”

“I can find you some armor that would fit,” the pup insisted.

“Friend, what good is the armor without the skill?”

Lyanna heard without listening. Part of her suddenly, and shockingly, wished that Robert would ask her to dance. It was not Robert’s company itself so much as the realization that it really was quite nice to have someone look at you the way that Ned was looking at his violet woman. Possibly spring magic was meant for two after all.

“Are you to find yourself a beloved tonight and leave me as well, Ben?” she asked her youngest brother, but the pup’s attentions were occupied elsewhere, in the thrall of a rather scruffy looking man in black who was talking some talk of the greater good of the kingdom and terrors beyond the Wall and other things that Lyanna was in no mood to think on that night. She had never known such spectacle before, such color, everywhere a hum. She could almost feel herself floating.

When she landed again, she realized that the hall was quiet, but for the silver sound of a harp. Atop the royal dais the dragon king’s son, Rhaegar Targaryen, sat strumming a song as beautiful as he, with something of his haunting grace in the melody. His voice was clear, his words heavy. Too heavy for such a festivity, Lyanna thought, and yet the room had yielded to his song like sunlight to the night. He sang of forgotten kingdoms and lost magic, and death, death most of all. He sang of a long night, of the end of things, which is the saddest of all stories.

Lyanna wept. Her zeal for merriment ebbed away and some older feeling surfaced, nameless and groping. She was a young fourteen then, instead of an old one, and it mattered beyond words that flowers would wither and rivers would dry, that a man could grow old and forget his trade, that two lovers might stop loving, that a star falls each and every night. Older people forget they were ever like this.

When her pup brother laughed at her tears, she turned her wine-cup over his head and then blushed immediately for doing so. She had resolved to disregard any ridicule her brothers might serve up, and she had botched it horrendously. With some perseverance she made herself bright and breezy again, and before the night ended she did dance with Lord Robert after all. He had won his war of wine-cups with old Lonmouth and bore up remarkably well nevertheless, squeezing her too tightly in some turns but leaving her toes blessedly unharmed. He was trying to take care with her, and those sort of intentions do often melt hearts.

Later, in bed, Lyanna tried to imagine Robert singing a song such as the dragon prince’s, and fell asleep chuckling.

  
The tournament began with the joust. Robert sat in Ned’s place by Lyanna, for Brandon had convinced Ned to enter the day’s lists by some miracle. It made Robert chuckle. “Once he came down here, I knew he’d be just as glory-bound as the rest of us.”

But Lyanna doubted it was glory that moved her brother. “I think it’s love.”

“Even better!” Robert hooted.

The jousting began with the defenders of the queen of love and beauty, who was Lord Whent’s fair daughter, as champions. The maiden Whent had four brothers and one uncle, Ser Oswell Whent, a great knight of the white companionship of the Kingsguard, and it was their part to take on challengers and defeat them in her honor. “Why should her honor depend on their might?” she wondered aloud, but Robert laughed as it if was a jape or riddle he suspected that he ought to have understood, and Lyanna never received an answer.

They fell immediately, the brothers and their famous uncle, to the first challengers on the field. Those men in turn were defeated one by one, and by the end of the day the group of champions were men she did not know. Brandon would take to the field another day, but for Ned the enterprise was over, he had lost his tilt and returned to the wolf pack’s place in the gallery without much ado.

“I don’t care for this _sport_ ,” he avowed. Lyanna laughed, positive that it was because he had not impressed his lady, but she supposed if anyone were to find a moral principle in such an opinion, it would be Ned.

Among the day’s champions was a knight with a sigil Lyanna had seen before: a porcupine, the same as one of the squires who had attacked Howland. She turned to the crannogman, who sat with the wolves, and pointed him out, and Howland nodded.

“If only your brother’s offer would do me any good,” he sighed.

“Offer?”

“Yes. Do you not remember? Last night, at the feast, Benjen offered to find me some armor that would suit someone as small as myself, but I have never learned to joust. I have sent my prayers to the old gods in their isle upon the God’s Eye, yet no answer has come.”

She did not remember because she had not been listening, just as she was finding it difficult to listen now. Only now, it was because that heroic spirit had seized her again and filled her with an excitement. She still felt grievously wroth on Howland’s behalf, and it irked her to think of the wrong remaining unrighted. She glanced askew at Robert and Ned, and Brandon especially, and told Howland to sit by her at the feast again that night, for they had some matters to discuss.

  
The next day, Lyanna did not join her brothers in the gallery. Robert was concerned; had she a headache? Was she cross with him? When Benjen said that she was merely tired from all their long southbound journeying ahorse, only Brandon raised an eyebrow in query, and not for very long. The day’s jousting was especially sporting, so they were all quickly absorbed. Joining the porcupine knight on the champions stand early in the day were two other figures notorious by association, the pitchfork knight and the knight of two towers. “What fortune,” the wolf pup remarked, unnoticed.

Morning became afternoon and the shadows grew long, and at the end of the field a knight appeared in the lists whom nobody recognized. He bore no known device, only a shield with a white weirwood tree, and on the tree, a red face, laughing with joy. After he dipped his lance to the king, he rode down the lists and tapped on the shields of three knights: the knight of the porcupine, of the pitchfork, and of the two towers. The crowd murmured with intrigue and speculation, yet none could place the man with the laughing tree on his shield.

 _I am no man_ , Lyanna wanted to say from within the ill-fitting armor, yet she kept silent and eyed her first opponent. She remembered her practices at the quintain with Brandon, and said a prayer to the old gods, and let the rhythm of her horse’s hooves pull her to focus. The porcupine knight fell to her lance, and after him the pitchfork knight, and then the knight of two towers, and never yet had the crowd cheered so loudly. Lyanna raised her hands in victory when they announced her one of the day’s champions, and when the three fallen knights came to offer their ransoms, she announced in a booming voice through her helm, “Teach your squires honor, that shall be ransom enough.”

It sounded appropriately heroic to her ears.

  
At that night’s feast the mystery knight was all anyone spoke of. Lyanna did not claim her victory, of course, how could she? Nobody would believe her, and what was more, the king had made it known that the mystery knight was an enemy of the crown, and offered a reward to any who discovered his true identity. She was suddenly worried. If she was found out, what would the king do to her? He was not a gentle king, and there was even talk that he was mad. She could not understand why she had earned the king’s enmity, but it couldn’t mean anything good.

On the third day Lyanna was yet again missing from the gallery. She had gone to rid herself of the laughing tree shield, which she had hid in her trunk until then. The armor had been too indistinct to track down, but the laughing tree she had painted on the shield would tell her secret as soon as it might be found.

She chose a direction opposite from the jousting grounds and rode on hastily, an uncomfortably large cloak hiding the shield. Among an alcove of poplar trees she stopped, and when she was sure no one was around she hung the shield carefully upon a branch.

“Thank you for giving me the strength,” she said aloud to the painted weirwood tree. “I will content myself with knowing that justice was served.”

“And every history book shall be the poorer.”

Lyanna turned to see who had spoken. She was angry at having been discovered, but when she saw who it was her anger vanished. It was the crown prince, Rhaegar Targaryen, who had sung the song that made her cry her first night here.

“Your highness,” she said awkwardly, dropping to one knee. “I did not— I hadn’t realized that—“

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” He was looking at her intently with his eyes of purple, and Lyanna felt herself weaken at the knees. “You rode magnificently in the lists, my lady.”

“How did you know?” Then she remembered the shield, and felt foolish for her question. “I had to do it, your highness.”

“Even if it means the eternal enmity of my royal father?”

“Their squires attacked an innocent man,” she explained fervently.

“It is rare to see such bravery in the face of injustice,” the prince declared with a quiet sureness. “Even rarer from someone so beautiful.”

Lyanna spent the entirety of the next day absorbed in memory of the meeting.

The fifth day marked the end of the jousting. The northern contingent cheered loudly for their own, the young lord Brandon Stark, while the commons were wild for their heroes, Ser Barristan Selmy and Ser Arthur Dayne of the kingsguard. There too came Yohn Royce also with his bronze armor, bearing runes of the old gods even though he hailed from the Vale. “He’s a brave man, and strong,” Ned told her. “Brandon will have his hands full should they meet.” Despite any lingering distaste for the sport, Ned supported their brother with all his heart.

The loudest cheers were for Prince Rhaegar, clad in black armor encrusted with rubies, a scarlet plume trailing from his magnificent helm. He carried himself as if he were king already, and when he tilted, no man could touch him. One by one they all fell to the dragon prince, Brandon and Royce and Dayne and all. The last foe was Ser Barristan Selmy, and Rhaegar managed to make even that great knight look a slow old man. It was the prince’s day.

Lyanna clapped mightily, even though Brandon had lost, and she realized that she was excited on behalf of the prince. She watched him take the crown of roses from outstretched hands and search among the crowd for the fortunate woman he would name the queen of love and beauty. Lyanna was not the only one who gazed then at Princess Elia, who sat in the royal box smiling at her husband with anticipation.

And Lyanna was not the only one who gasped when he rode past her. The dragon prince was coming Lyanna’s way, and as he neared, she could see the crown come into focus, an exquisite circlet of roses, blue as frost. “For a champion,” he said, low, dropping it into her lap.

  
Lyanna did not wear the crown about the grounds that day, nor the next, nor any other day of the tourney. Quite the silence had befallen the throng when the dragon prince rode his caparisoned charger past his princess, nary a word nor even a glance thrown her way. Scandal was the least that was called for. What was more, if Lyanna’s brothers had laughed at her tears shed for the dragon’s song, they would surely find any trace of treasuring this crown of love and beauty ridiculous. It was because the gesture meant so much to her that she had to hide the token away, deep at the bottom of her chest of clothes, under her traveling cloak and riding leathers.

Why it meant anything to her at all, she couldn’t say. She knew it oughtn’t. Robert would not stop grumbling about the matter, and she worried that his anger might lead to something foolish. She was promised and, by the gods, the man himself was married, and what could possibly come of it? At night she took out the crown and studied it, grasped it, tried with all her might to infuse it with the shrinking dullness of familiarity. The roses were not even so very blue, no doubt they would pale next to her garden full of blossoms at Winterfell. But oh, if that didn’t make it more like the world’s most perfect frost, oh, if it didn’t insist on being beautiful.

How could he know that winter roses were her favorites? Someone must have told. Perhaps her own heart, when she hadn’t been looking. On the sixth day there was an archery contest held, and sitting there in the stands, watching, Lyanna felt very much like an archer at ready, bowstring taut with the impending release of one ultimate arrow.

The seventh day was for the melee.

It was the day of the gods down there in the south, for the southrons had seven each with their own face, each a facet of the one. And it was the day of the kingdom, a house of seven, a prism, a rainbow. In grey the men of the north stood waiting for the horn to sound, a fog upon the field, but they were fewer than the rest as northmen did not often play such games of war. Ned had not cared for even the jousting, and now Brandon too sat out the day by her side, and none could say that House Stark gave its sanction. This left but one man to whom she could give her favor. She saw no way to refuse her betrothed, and so she gave it, feeling even then as if she lied. She decided not to dwell on guilt; Robert would neither love her for withholding it.

The gold of the stormlords burned the brightest, it was true, but all about the field there was something to behold. From the south end the orange-clad men of Dorne shot out to meet an outgrowth of Highgarden green, each force toothy with naked eagerness. In sky blue the men of the Vale descended, flanked by a stream of Tully men, weaving down like a river, and a stream of Lannister men, spilling forth like blood. It was like a carefully choreographed dance of colors, each of the seven sides ascending to its own height of glory, playing its part. For a moment there was beauty on the field.

Then the blower blew the horn, and it was gone. Melees were a rather brutal affair, all things considered, even those with such rules as Lord Whent had seen fit to impose at Harrenhal. There were no rules of fairness or honor between enemies, only sheer force and will mattered. Robert won. Of course Robert won. Robert was a man made for such achievements. He dedicated his victory to his betrothed, the lady Lyanna Stark, his inspiration and light, and basked in his applause with guileless enthusiasm. Lyanna remembered her own victory, which had gone unacknowledged by all, except one man.

  
The days after the melee were but a matter of course. Axe-throwing and the tupinaire commandeered the mornings, and the mummers ushered in the evenings earlier and earlier with their farces and merriments. Feasting dragged on long into the night, for the greater part of the tournament’s activities was done, and men were in the mood to carouse instead of pummel and mutilate. It was wise of Lord Whent to have structured his tournament in this way, for then the bloodlust of the combatants might gradually slacken before their release back into the world. This kept the countryside contented.

On the last day before the wolf pack was to begin for home, a horserace was held on the shores of the God’s Eye. Her brothers laughed and sported with Robert and Howland Reed, too determined to commemorate their camaraderie to attend to the attraction. But Lyanna kept her eyes fixed on the hooves of the horses, pounding as they went, pounding away in a great cloud of dust. Her heart pounded with them. A stronger rider than her brothers, was she, and unafraid of the chase. When the victor was proclaimed Lyanna could discern little of him, other than that his horse was a grey mare pale as mist.

One year later, almost to the day, Lyanna Stark disappeared with crown prince Rhaegar Targaryen in the dead of night, under a sky of cold-clear stars. The snows had returned by then, for it had been no true spring after all.

Perhaps the gods had meant it as a warning.


	3. The Bone White Tower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who was Lyanna Stark, and why did she run? And where was she going without ever knowing the way?
> 
> Pt 1 is Lyanna's childhood at Winterfell, Pt 2 covers the events at Harrenhal, and Pt 3 has the "abduction"/Tower of Joy stuff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt for this fic was "Rhaegar/Lyanna - An unromantic, brutal view of their relationship."

The way it happened was this: the eldest wolf cub was finally to wed, and so once again the wolves journeyed into the riverlands. But this time they were apart, for Ned was in the Vale with his foster father, while Lyanna had been tucked away back home in Winterfell. Brandon had not come home after the Whent tourney, for he had stayed in the south making preparations for his wedding. Lord Rickard stayed behind with Benjen, deciding which of them would attend and which of them would stay behind as the Stark in Winterfell. Lyanna had convinced her lord father to let her go on ahead by herself; it had taken four months of good behavior and all her powers of persuasion.

In an inn near the Trident, an important waterway junction that kept the place busy enough for her to evade the eyes of her modest traveling party, Lyanna sat and unfolded the letter she had written all those months ago. “Come for me,” she had scrawled in her youthful hand, and on the back she had read, in the finest penmanship, the words “I will come.”

After that, it was a matter of waiting. She delayed her party’s departure from the inn, citing fatigue and soreness, and other ailments that never troubled her from horse-riding. It didn’t matter. They could not defy her, and if they suspected, they did not know what.

He came under the cover of night, with a pair of dark steeds and a spare raincloak for the journey. They were to travel light. She delayed only to leave coin for her board at the inn, and then they were gone.

They sped down the kingsroad like the wind, and there was no time for flower-picking, but she did insist on a wedding. “Of course,” he tossed back at her over his shoulder. She was a stranger down here in the south, and so though at times she threatened to overtake him, as she was surer of foot over snow and ice than he, she would pull back and follow again out of necessity. When they were far enough below Harrenhal, the lands warmed and the snow around them melted away to grass and rock, and the prince made excellent time.

Often they would leave the road for detours through valleys and forests, using uncharted paths that the prince knew by heart. “Do you run away from home often?” she teased, and the prince only smiled. They spoke freely, more so as they warmed, and stopped to eat when they willed, and bathed in hidden streams and slept upon the grass. It almost didn’t matter if they ever reached anywhere.

  
“What is this place?”

They had come to the ruins of a castle, which had never been very big, but was clearly once beautiful. Or perhaps it was simply beautiful now, a kind of beauty particular to life that deigns to thrive amidst death.

“Summerhall,” he said, somewhat sadly. “It sits by the border of the Stormlands, the Reach, and Dorne. We’re actually in the Marches now. Daeron the Good made this place in the homeland of his wife, whom he loved.” They dismounted, and Lyanna let him take care of the horses. “I’ve sent for a septon from Wyl, he should be coming up the Boneway as we speak.”

“Oughtn’t we be wed at King’s Landing, my prince?” For that matter, oughtn’t his first wife be present? She had never contemplated how Targaryen marriages were supposed to work, she only knew that many dragons had taken two wives before.

He shook his head and said with some fervor, “The wedding must take place here. Nowhere else.”

That night Rhaegar sang to her, a song of power and prophecy underneath the open sky. “Once, they tried here to bring the dragons back, to stave off the long night.”

“What’s that?” she asked, drowsy.

“The end of the world.”

  
When the septon arrived, Lyanna had gone to pick flowers for her hair. She had no fresh gown, but she would do her best to be a beautiful bride nonetheless. The ceremony was quick, with a local shepherd to act as their witness. Lyanna was drunk on her joy, and wanted to stay in that ruined castle the rest of their days. “We’ll be like castaways.”

But the prince had already saddled his horse, and when Lyanna looked around for hers she couldn’t find it.

“We can’t stay here,” he explained, a strange gleam in his eye. “This is a place of ruin, not of birth. They tried to rebirth the dragons here, but they were wrong.”

Lyanna only laughed. “We needn’t have a child right away, my love. But very well, I’ve no preference. I could be anywhere so long as it was with you. King’s Landing, then? I want to meet your princess first – oh, am I a princess now?”

“We’re not going King’s Landing either.”

Lyanna didn’t understand. Where were they to go, then? Suddenly she was afraid. “Where is my horse,” she asked flatly.

“I’ve killed it.” The prince answered as easily as if he were talking about a pestering mouse in the kitchens. “I couldn’t take the chance.”

“What chance?”

“You’re a faster horseman than I. I couldn’t let you escape.”

Frozen by her fear, she did nothing as Rhaegar closed the space between them and grasped her shoulders.

“You are ice and I am fire, it had to be this way. The song of ice and fire. You shall bear my child immediately, and he shall be the prince who was promised, the shield that guards the realms of man from the long night.”

 _The man is mad_ , she thought. “But I thought you loved me.”

The prince’s look was eerily vacant, and he said only, “Come. We have a long way to go.”

“Where are we going?”

“There’s a tower near enough to here, down the Boneway and in through the mountains. I call it the tower of joy, and it shall be our home now.”

“I don’t want this anymore,” she said wildly. “I won’t go. Take me back, I want to go home.” She struggled, but it did no good, nor the look of mute appeal she threw at the septon, who only stood by watching.

The prince said simply, “I’m afraid that is impossible. Come now, before dark falls. We don’t want you to get hurt.”

  
Some of the worst times are when there is nothing to do but think. Sometimes thoughts are the most painful knives, cutting into a mind’s peace with rusted, scarring edges. Lyanna had nothing to do but think for days, days upon days, and her mind became a ragged sail gone limp in the wind. She had no way to escape from herself, and so she thought as she rode, of her brothers and father, of her roses, of certainty, of sunsets, of Robert and her secret message and her folly. She was caught now more completely than she had ever been, and she had done it all to herself.

He had given her a crown, and he had sung to her of his sadness, and what did she truly know of such things, child that she was?

Sometime in the too-rosy dawn, Rhaegar’s horse stopped, and the bone white tower emerged from an outstretched arm of mountain as if it was expecting her.

  
In the earliest days of her captivity, Lyanna felt as if there were two of her: one there in her body, and one floating in the air, looking down on her other self, and the things that were happening outside her bolted door. She saw the food come and the chamber pots leave, and letters come and go that no one shared with her, and the men walking down the winding steps to their posts below. There were three of them besides the prince, three members of the kingsguard that she had first seen at Harrenhal. Arthur Dayne, who was called the Sword of the Morning, Oswell Whent, who had been a champion at the tourney, and Lord Commander Gerold Hightower, the White Bull. Three brothers, but not hers, guarding her like a possession.

The prince let those early days of numbness pass before he started coming to see her. “I know you must be angry, but you must understand why I did it.” Lyanna had understood everything during his first explanation, but she let him prattle on. “Please understand what’s at stake here, the lives of so many people. I had to do something, I could not just stand by.” So it would go day after day, and she knew what he needed. He needed her womb in which to grow his child, he needed her body to create his weapon, and he would not use force but the force of his persuasion.

Lyanna refused to be persuaded.

The prince kept up his attentions regardless, informing her of what was going on beyond the mountains of Dorne. He told her of Robert’s amassing army and of the coming war to recover her. He told her that he might leave at any moment, depending on how the fighting went, and that was why he had to keep coming to her bed every night, to ensure that a child would come. “There’s so much at stake,” he tried to explain, And he told her of the deaths of Lord Rickard and young Lord Brandon, who had challenged the crown on her behalf and lost to Aerys’ cruelty.

That was the first time Lyanna tried to beat him. Of all people, she thought of Robert then, and how Robert would have surely succeeded in outmatching Rhaegar when it came to such brute contests. But all she felt was impotence, nothing she did made even a scratch. It was the same way whenever she tried to escape. She might outwit one of her captors a time or two when they opened the door to bring her food, but there was always another waiting to catch her again. She might successfully climb to the roof of the tower, but there was never any place to go where they would not find her. Whenever, however, she tried to outmatch them, it was clear that she was never any real threat at all. They flicked her like a fly from their white shoulders.

Eventually, Lyanna gave in to the crown prince’s nightly visits. It had seemed a valiant thing to be so defiant, but perhaps it was really only comical, in that way others’ delusions often seem. She was looking at herself from the outside in and seeing only a fool, and as time wore on she felt like one from the inside out too. She began talking to the walls when there was no one about, and imagining rescues that never were approaching through her tower window, and everything was always funny now, so very amusing. The prince asked her what he could do to help her mourn her brother and father. “Send me to them in a box with blue ribbons,” she replied, thinking for a moment that he would oblige her. Then she remembered his promised child.

Months passed in this way. She feared she was doomed. She was certain she was mad. On the day Rhaegar finally left for the Trident, to meet her betrothed on the mud red shores, she had watched his departure from the balcony, standing by a wall of blue roses that had grown up against the side of the tower. She plucked one and took it in hand. She laughed a bone white laugh.

  
After the prince left, Lyanna decided once again to resume her escapes. It would be a sort of game, to see how far she could get or how many knights it took to contain her. She did not expect to get anywhere, but this was no longer the objective.

Most often it was the White Bull himself who retrieved her. He was strong and whenever he deposited her back in her bed she expected bruises. She didn’t care. She bore her teeth at him, something like a grin, or a knife, and after he locked her door she would throw her voice after him and laugh. “Do you think you’ve beaten me? Do you think you’ve won?” Even a rose had thorns, and she wanted to make them bleed, somehow.

They didn’t. Ser Gerold Hightower took no pleasure from his duties, nor Ser Oswell Whent, nor the great Ser Arthur Dayne. They did not even revel in her misery or hysteria, because they were embarrassed for her. It made it worse.

She stopped her second series of escapes when she realized she was with child.

  
A girl cannot become a mother without alteration. There are all the physical ways, the swelling of the belly, the weakness in the shoulders, the sickness spells. Then there are the deep changes. She changes course and speed, seeks a new wind for her sails. She cannot do as she wills, for she must do as her baby wills, and it was difficult for Lyanna not to feel the resentment in her heart. Still, she succeeded. She slowed herself, took to walking about the little balcony, with no haste for there was nowhere to go. She watched the sun rise in the east and set in the west, remembered faintly the time when her heart could follow it, courteously asked her captors now and then for news of the war, but nothing more. She would go gently and cause no trouble. At night she would send a prayer to any old gods who might hear her to protect her dear Ned, who had surely taken Brandon’s place against Aerys, and should they spare a thought for her once betrothed and the father of her child, she would not quarrel.

And once again, there was nothing for her to do but think. When people would talk of all of this, as they were sure to do, they would all say that Rhaegar was a great hero. He had brought forth the child that would save the world, and perhaps there was tragedy in it, but it would be the lesser of all possible tragedies. That was what she was, the lesser tragedy. She couldn’t even deny it.

She wanted to be strong for this life now within her, as she knew she ought to be, but her soul was weary. Anger had given her her strength, bitterness her purpose, and without them she was only a maid crossed by love. She gathered the winter roses by day as if she were still lovesick, as if she didn’t hate Rhaegar Targaryen and what he had done to her, for the roses were her friends of old. She sat often and remembered.

  
More months passed, and Lyanna took to bed for longer and longer stretches of time. These days she was filled with a sureness that her pregnancy would not leave her strong. One day as she lay abed, someone new unlocked her door. It was a woman, she could tell right away, though the stranger wore a great veil that hid her form. When she removed it, Lyanna saw a beautiful face framed by pale hair, with haunting eyes of violet.

“I’ve seen you before.” The woman hovered at the far side of the room by a small silver basin, with a wetted linen against her face, sighing deeply. Then she peeled the dusty gloves from her hands and washed those too, and when that was done she took a pouch of coins from her waist and set them upon the table, and then she removed her belt and sighed out more greatly than before, and fished pins from her hair, and a dagger from her boot, and the dirt out from beneath her nail. All this she did without a single flicker of recognition of Lyanna’s words.

Eventually: “You have. At the great tourney at Harrenhall.”

“My lady.” She smiled in remembrance. “You danced with my brother.”

“Indeed, my princess thought him quite the poor dancer. _You_ will recall the Princess Elia, I presume?”

So it was that the Lady Ashara Dayne stuck her toe into the sand and carved out a line.

  
In the first place, she had only come because the prince had commanded it. “Were it up to me, the man would be in King’s Landing protecting his children and lady wife.” She had a stiff way of speaking, as if it strained too many muscles to animate herself more than absolutely necessary. “But he has gone to the Trident to meet your betrothed on the field, perhaps even die for you. How honored you must feel.”

“Robert Baratheon is no longer my betrothed, though he may yet believe so.” _Poor man_ , she thought. “I too am Rhaegar’s wife now.”

“So it would seem. Why else would my knightly brother be here, instead of where he belongs?”

“I bear his child as well,” Lyanna explained, feeling feeble and dull. All this time in her tower she had resented belonging to Rhaegar, and now she clung to the aegis of his person, because she had no choice. She hated that feeling, as much as she ever had. But in her belly was a life that needed her, needed so purely, and the old feelings suddenly seemed unripe and unfledged. She had decided to love this baby, for though it was Rhaegar’s, it was hers too.

“And such a child. A prince who was promised? Will honors never cease. I am here for this child of yours, as it happens, for if the fighting goes against us Robert will come for you, and he will not be kind.”

Lyanna clutched at her belly. Lady Ashara had not spoken false. “You will take my baby from me?”

“This child must live. Somewhere, somehow, with or without you. I have my orders.”

  
The Lady Ashara was not an icy woman; Lyanna could not believe her to be heartless. Proud, certainly, she made her pride known daily, but this was because she was loyal to her Dornish princess and that loyalty surely spoke of some capacity for affection. It was also unlike Ned to be enamored of the cruel. But she was no mother, and Lyanna was unsure how to make someone who wasn’t a mother understand a mother’s need to be with her child. There was not very much understanding in that world for a mother’s tears, even when things like princes and prophecies were not at stake.

“Tell me of the war, won’t you? So much has happened, and they don’t inform me of much.”

“They are afraid that news will upset your … _fragile_ condition. Though apparently secluding you in a tower room with little in the way of fresh air and sunlight won’t harm you at all. Men are not always the cleverest creatures in these matters, are they.” Lyanna wondered if she was being friendly.

“You spoke of the prince. Where is he now?”

“You cannot mean that you still love him.”

In the days since Ashara Dayne’s arrival, Lyanna had been doing a curious thing. She had taken the roses she’d gathered from her balcony and began to weave them together into a circlet. She had been recreating the crown that the prince had once given her, a thousand years ago, taking all that time that she had so much of to start over when it was imperfect or inaccurate. She had the image of it very clear in her mind, and she was trying to recreate it just as precisely.

“I loved him once, and if I hate him now, is hatred not another side of love itself? I have often felt it so.” The unfinished circlet lay in her hands, heavier than it ought to have been. “Or perhaps I was never in love with him, only what I thought he could be, and what he still is somewhere in my mind. He had given me hope when I thought that all hope was gone.”

“Pretty words,” the lady Ashara threw back, “but how was it you forgot during all your hoping that you loved a married man?”

“Like you with my brother?” Lyanna asked, smiling sadly at Lady Ashara’s surprise. “Ned is married now, you know. Oh, you must know. If I know then surely everyone knows.”

There was silence in her tower room for a long while, and Lyanna could not hear a single sob, but when the lady Ashara looked up her eyes glistened with tears. “That is not the same.”

“Perhaps,” Lyanna said, “but if you had met him now, would it stop your heart? We cannot help whom we love, can we.”

The lady Ashara began to weep helplessly; in that moment she had surrendered her dignity. “Would he ever speak of me? Please, won’t you tell me.”

  
Women in love are not so very different. Even two women who love the same man are kin more so than hostile bodies, for they can speak a shared language of private intelligence. In the last weeks of her pregnancy Lyanna talked often of love; it was one of the things she had wanted most in a life that was almost over. She had grown philosophical in her final days, as many do.

“I could not love Robert if he were untrue. What woman would be happy then?”

“Not even Dornish women appreciate a dishonest husband.” Lady Ashara smiled wryly.

“And yet running from him has not made me happier. Swift as could be, and still I am caught. I was so certain.”

“Because a prince with sad eyes sang you a beautiful song. It is a common tale, in its way.”

“When they tell my tale, they will make it beautiful. That’s the worst part of all this, do you know? Dying isn’t beautiful at all. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to live.” She looked down then, and realized, serenely, that her crown was finished. “I have always loved beauty.”

“You should tell your little one better tales, I should think. Dornish tales, now those are fine.” She laughed, and then looked into Lyanna’s eyes, and then remembered.

“It’s alright. I shall die here, whether Robert finds me or no. I was never meant to survive, I realize this now. It’s how the story always goes.”

“A mother dying for her child?”

Lyanna nodded. “I wish I had known my mother better.”

“Mothers can be difficult to hold on to, even in Dorne. I suppose if you had a sister, then.”

“Perhaps. I never did have a sister.”

  
At this point in Lyanna’s life the gods decided to grant her some small measure of grace, and there was a window of time to hear some of Lady Ashara’s Dornish tales. Then the letter came, on the wing of a black bird, and the Lady Ashara sank to the floor with grief. “My princess,” she said, words falling like the rain. In a haste she gathered her things, her gloves and pins and pouch of coins, and Lyanna knew she was leaving.

“But your orders? And my baby. Please, my baby.”

“They’re attacking the city, don’t you see? I must go, my princess needs me.” She stopped mid-stride, catching her breath, and a tear that threatened to fall. “Orders, yes. Do not worry. There will be someone here for your babe.”

“You will return, then?”

“I shall try.”

“Good,” Lyanna said, sinking back into the pillows. “I am glad. I become so lonely here.”

She did not see the other woman again.

  
When death came at last for Lyanna Stark the sky was red as blood outside her window. It was fitting. There was blood all around her, blood of her womb, and in her hands the thorns of the winter crown barbed into her flesh. She was alone, but for the baby that was killing her so that it might live, and she had little else to hold on to. It’s frightfully difficult to let go of a last hope, if anyone ever manages to accomplish it at all.

Her screams rang in her own ears, her screams, and then voices amidst the din. Outside there was a battle, yes, it had to be, but how? Who? Would Robert come and kill her baby, just as soon as it had killed her? She prayed that it would live, for she had nothing left to her but prayer.

Lyanna had never known such pain. No sword had ever ripped her apart like this, and it lasted so terribly long. But when she heard the babe’s cries at last, it was better somehow. It was soothing. A pair of hands placed the baby in her arms, and she opened her eyes just enough to know it was a boy. She was so weak.

“My prince?” she asked wistfully.

“It’s me, sister, I’m here. We must get you away from here.”

“Ned.” It was him, she knew his voice. She wondered how he had found her, but it didn’t matter now. She was grateful to see one of her brothers one last time. “Ned, you must promise to protect my son. From Robert, from Rhaegar, from everyone. He is a Stark, do you understand?” She cupped her infant son’s head with her hand, smoothing the patches of dark hair. _Thank the gods_ , she thought. “He must live.”

“I never wanted any of this for you, Lya.”

“I know.” He was truly a dear heart, even if he had never understood. “What I said, you must promise me.”

“I promise.” She felt his tears on her face, felt her grasp around the crown of blue roses crumbling.

“Promise me, Ned.”

“I love you, Lya.”

It was a sweet thing to say.


End file.
